How did you spend your weekend?

- 1 day wasted on trying to configure a project

- 1 day spent on formatting documentation ( including changelogs & mailing archives, project started in 1987? The repo still has files that were last updated 26 years ago )

How do you even still have that metadata? What version control system was used in 1997?

@lorentz Git I guess, idk, that's what GitHub says.

https://github.com/vixie/cron

@ElectroArchiver funny part is the initial commit date is 1996, but then you open a file (lets say putman.sh) and the comment says it was written on 27dec93

i wonder if there's a way to have git reflect the actual date

@ElectroArchiver git only exist since 2005.

But it is possible that a different VCS was used and than moved to git, while keeping the history.

I guess this lines where used by the VCS:

# $Id: <filename>,v 1.1 <year timestamp> <some more text> $

@lorentz

When you look at the history you will see that:

- .gitignore was .cvsignore from 1998-08-14 till 2006-07-11

- .cvsignore was changed to .gitignore on 2021-02-07 (no commits between 2006-07-11 and 2021-02-07)

- Inital commit was on 1996-12-16

- In CHANGES it is mentioned that he wrote it in 1986.

This means: Project started 1986. Till 1996-12-16 there was probably no VCS used, till 2021-02-07 Concurrent Versions System was used and then it moved to git.

@happygimp0 Thank you for your detective work~

Can't even imagine not using versioning ..

@ElectroArchiver I've been workning on a project w/o version control directly on prod in a team w/h Indian guys... from that type that just copy-paste from SO... and somehow the site is still runing and making revenue. I'm sure of that even that I haven't checked it in a while...It was hacked few times in the period I was not working there and shortly after I wen't back at that firm I quit forever for good.

@We3D Amazingly scary sounding ..

@ElectroArchiver I can talk about that for hours, and mainly bad things. I might even have enough material for a book : "The aftermath of an burnout" w/h subtile "Was it worth it : Hell yeah. Will I do it again if I have the chance : HELL NO!"...but then again who will read it and will my experince and thoughts about it will bring any meaning and value to them? Who knows...